Sunday Sentence: “Centrifugal Force” by Jodi Angel

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Nobody said anything, and then the sound of the hammer stopped and Harold stood upright and stretched his back and looked at the group of us, gathered around, and Harold said hey, you guys wanna go walking? and we all nodded and Harold rubbed his hammer clean on the patchy lawn and shoved the head into his back pocket so that the handle stuck out like a comb, and we all followed him to the front of the house, and then we were on the street and Harold was in the lead, and we fanned out behind him and when he broke an antenna off a parked car, we all laughed, and then he did it again—snapped one off a green Chevy so that he had an antenna in each hand, and we wondered how many more he might take because there were a lot of parked cars on the street—and we kept laughing until he started whipping at our arms with them—hard—so that the thin metal left behind welts and it was impossible to fend him off—he had one in each hand—but nobody said anything because we were pretty relieved that Harold had forgotten about the hammer, and Harold was heading toward the 7-Eleven and somehow he was always the only one with some money, so we kept walking because we figured it was just a couple of car antennas and Harold was just a guy off his meds, and it was a Saturday in March, and it was getting too late in the afternoon to do something different.

“Centrifugal Force” by Jodi Angel, from Tin House: Summer Reading